NASA´s BITSE Solar Scope Is Ready for Balloon Flight Over New Mexico
(World News Science)

NASA and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, or KASI, are getting ready to test a new way to see the Sun, high over the New Mexico desert. A balloon - large enough to hug a football field - is scheduled to take flight no earlier than Aug. 26, 2019, carrying beneath it a solar scope called BITSE. BITSE is a coronagraph, a kind of telescope that blocks the Sun`s bright face in order to reveal its dimmer atmosphere, called the corona. Short for Balloon-borne Investigation of Temperature and Speed of Electrons in the corona, BITSE seeks to explain how the Sun spits out the solar wind. The solar wind is the stream of charged particles that constantly blows from the Sun`s outer...